ABSTRACT
Both Elizabeth Caiy’s The Tragedy of Mariam and Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women depend upon the physical staging space in which violent acts occur, the inner motives and desires of their women characters, and the social positions to which these women belong. There are marked differences between these playwrights—Elizabeth Cary is a woman writer working in an elite genre, the Senecan closet drama, and Middleton is a professional male author writing in a popular genre for the London stage. The texts also approach their female protagonists quite differently—while Middleton portrays Bianca’s darker side, Cary largely exculpates Mariam. Cary’s playscript empowers what is absent, establishing a theme that will be crucial in the play’s final scene as the voice of murdered Mariam returns to the desperate Herod. By choosing to place important violent incidents behind the scenes, Middleton and Cary enact the questions of evidence that are at the root of their plays.
